


Heat entering each pearl

by lotesse



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Genre: Class Issues, F/F, F/M, Feminist Themes, Infidelity, Lingerie, Luxury, Queer Themes, Seaside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:04:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When I first became her personal maid, I thought of Rebecca as my absolute opposite: delicate where I was hard, as rose-mouthed and sensuous as I was pale and papery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat entering each pearl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Greenleafsdaughter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greenleafsdaughter/gifts).



When Rebecca Mason was a bewitching girl of seventeen, with sparkling dark eyes and a way of carrying her body that made her seem three years older than she really was, I was a thin, stern spinster of twenty-four, and was not yet called Mrs. Danvers.

In the scant space of those few first years, I was to be married, widowed, and lose my heart – in that order, and no other.

When I first became her personal maid, I thought of Rebecca as my absolute opposite: delicate where I was hard, as rose-mouthed and sensuous as I was pale and papery. But Rebecca was iron and steel beneath her girlish looks, and when I behaved flintily to her she threw up bright showers of sparks. She was a tall girl, nearly as tall as I was, but she still somehow managed to seem fairy-small, an unflattering contrast with my own peculiar and unlovely height.

At seventeen Rebecca looked like a Pre-Raphaelite goddess – Miranda when she was playing sweet, Circe when she was wicked. Her sea-dark blue-indigo eyes glittered intelligently under the concealing weight of her long languid lashes, and her dark rope of hair, when I unpinned it for her at night, hung down her back in wild curling snarls.

She had the most lovely hair. It was thick as a pelt, and wild. Every night I would brush it for her, the soft yielding bristles of the brush pulling at tangles, smoothing them, making her mane shine in the light. She never minded when I had to tug at a snarl, but would rather turn her head away from each brushstroke to intensify the pull. It bared the pale arch of her neck, so that I could see the tiny tremor where her heartbeat fluttered her blood into rushing waves in her veins.

Danvers was her beau, at first. He was a fisherman, coarse-handed and salt-skinned, and she never made any pretense at marrying him; he was for the use of her pleasure only. She was always perfectly clear about that. But she needed some excuse to enjoy his company – some screen for her naked sexuality – and so she asked me, one night as I was lacing her into an evening gown, if I would marry him and so remove any sign of impropriety from their intimacy.

I wish that I could say she shocked me, that I could lay the blame for the way that I suddenly pulled tight on her bone corset at the feet of womanly virtue – but I cannot. She did not shock me; I knew too well from the moment I saw beyond her girlish semblance what Rebecca was. I knew that she would ask the world of me, and I knew myself incapable of denying her anything.

I married Danvers two weeks after her request was made, in a private ceremony down at a little stone chapel, and when I said my vows I could hear the surf crashing up against the cliffs at the sea's edge. He spent our wedding night in Rebecca's bed, and while I was happy enough to be freed from any responsibility regarding his pleasure, I will admit that I envied him that place. Not his infidelity but hers kept me awake, lying on narrow boards and pale sheets with my hand between my legs, fighting to imagine that my hands were smaller and softer and belonged to her rather than to me.

I did not live with Danvers in his house down by the harbor, not-entirely-feigning devotion to my young mistress as a cause for not leaving her house. But she herself left often enough, the two of us walking down, I stopping short of the house that she meant to enter.

For more than a year he was one of her playmates, though not for long the only one – a wide-eyed gentleman's son joined the ranks of Rebecca's lovers a month after my marriage, and a French tutor some weeks later was more than happy to allow himself to be seduced by his lovely pupil. There was nothing dishonest in her, and she never promised more to her lovers than what she was willing to give them – moments of her time, slices of her being, fragments of her body and her pleasure. If they failed to understand, how could the fault be hers, who made neither pretense nor lie to any of them? But I have never understood the way that men seemed to expect to own Rebecca. I was wiser; I knew that I never should, and so tried not to wish for the impossible.

Danvers died the following spring, and the coroner who came said that the swelling and discoloration of his face were caused by the ingestion of hemlock. He must've been eating game birds that had fed on the plant, they said. You could die of hemlock poisoning that way, without so much as getting near the plant. I cannot confess to caring much, or to mourning him excessively. It's strange, considering the years I've borne his name as my own, but he never so much as brushed my heart. My husband was, quite literally, nothing to me.

His death meant my freedom, which gain I soon had cause to bless; Rebecca was to marry, and take up resident in her husband-to-be's ancestral estate of Manderley. I was to go with her, and keep her house.

I did not meet Maxim de Winter before he married my mistress – she was married abroad, and directly commenced the glamorous wedding tour that separated us by land and sea and time. But he was not with her when I met her at the station, and so the two of us made our first entrance into Manderley alone. Her slender fingers clung to me as we mounted the steps – I will remember that sensation until I die.

It was a large house, rising grand and imposing up out of the gathering evening as we approached down the drive. It was well-kept enough, but a sense clung about the place of disuse – a sense of dustiness, even where all was clean and tidy. “It wants vitality,” she said to me. “That's to be my mission here, Danny – to make this house alive again. But not tonight.”

I could tell that she was tired. Her face looked girlish in the shadows, and pale, and somehow ghostly. We did not tour Manderley that evening, but retired straightaway to the new Mrs. de Winter's rooms, perched at the top of the west wing, brooding above the sea.

It was a plain room, bare, devoid of color, but the leaded windowpanes swung open to let in the sound and scent of the sea, and there was something electric and magnificent in the stark contrast between the musty room and the wild water. “I will be able to make something of this,” she said approvingly. “Look at ceiling – that scrolling is heavenly. And I am so glad to have the sea with me still.”

The linens on the bed were white, but a spot of rosy golden color splashed across one of the pillows. She went to it, and picked up a long filmy nightdress of apricot satin, monogrammed: R de W. She made a queer face, halfway between a laugh and a sneer and the face you make when something precious is irreparably broken. “He must've left it here for me,” she said vaguely, her large dark eyes looking fixedly at the misted window-panes, distant and unseeing.

I did not know what to do. I asked her, at length, if she should like to put it on, and she nodded like an obedient child. I took off her frock, and her stockings, and her fine underthings – new ones, I saw, ones purchased since I'd touched her last – and it was as if I was peeling away all the accumulated layers of change that had touched her since she'd become mine, stripping her back down to that girl I'd once known. When I let the cool satin tumble down around her naked body she shivered, her dark nipples firm with sensation. It was just long enough, which surprised me. Rebecca was more than ordinarily tall, and gowns were frequently too short for her.

She crossed the room, and looked at herself in the glass. “I don't look different, do I, Danny?” she said softly. “And I suppose nothing's really changed. Yet everything seems different, somehow.” Then, impulsively, “Will you stay with me tonight?”

I nodded. What could I possibly say?

When we slipped together into that wide white bed, the lights put out and the shutters left open, she wriggled out of the nightgown. “I don't need his name on me tonight,” she said, and then gently turned my face toward hers and kissed me, kissed my mouth and my shoulder and then lower.

That was the first time I ever felt impelled toward worship. That night her body was my temple, and she was the only pearl of my desire, pale and warm and softly rounded. So vast was my thirst for her that I could have buried my mouth in her and yet remained unslaked. The wild ropes of her hair spread out across the white pillowslip, or recurved to curl around her bare breasts and my fingertips.

We were neither of us innocents; we both knew well enough how to please.

She loved me for three days, and we made plans for the house and ordered flowers and brocades and ornaments and paintings, and then Mr. de Winter came home. It's a strange thing, but of all Rebecca's men, all her lovers, he alone I hated and resented with jealous passion. He touched her and dressed her and paraded her in front of multitudes, and still he repulsed me. Not her – she slept with him more often than not, and jested and played with and teased him. There was a violence in her love-talk that had not been there before, true, but he was permitted to brush her hair and walk with her by the sea.

I remember, one night when I was dressing her for a ball, in a gown of deep royal blue-green, she pressed a long strand of tiny pearls into my hands. “They're cold,” she said. “Hold them close for me a moment, won't you Danny?”

I held them in my cupped hands, and she looked at me through the mirror. “You have no idea how beautiful you really are,” she said, and pressed a kiss over my closed fingers.

I warmed her pearls for her before I fastened them around her neck. There was something wild and sad in her face, but it did not reduce her to youth, as expressions of insecurity so often did. Instead, for the first time in my experience, Rebecca looked old, and my heart roared in my ears with a sound like a storm at sea.


End file.
